Fallout Equestria: Skyward
Fallout Equestria: Skyward was a complete Fallout: Equestria side-story posted on FimFiction.net. When published serially it ran to fourteen chapters; a heavily-edited ten-chapter version was released in 2017. It has since been unpublished again and remains on indefinite hiatus for a complete re-write. Story When Firewall wakes up in an abandoned facility, he soon realises something's wrong. When he steps outside to find a radioactive wasteland, he realises something is VERY wrong. The city is deserted. Well, deserted if not for a few settlers, slavers, scavengers, Steel Rangers, and secret pre-war conspiracies. So what? Summary Prologue - Coffee: The story opens in the past, with a unicorn and a pegasus activating a machine. Both plan on betraying the other, but it is the pegasus that succeeds. Much later, an agent notes an update from 'Lab 2'. Chapter 1 - Exit: Firewall wakes up in a room in an unfamiliar Lab 2. He finds a document telling him that the world's ended, and learns that Lab 2 exists to keep ponies in 'suspension' until after the megaspell radiation has subsided. After looting a bunch of tools, electronics, medical supplies and an empty gun, he opens the front door and goes outside. Chapter 2 - Today: He wanders down the road and loots an old caravan. He tries to intervene with a fight between a mare and some raiders, killing one and crippling another before fainting. Chapter 3 - Skies: The next morning he wakes up near a campfire. The stranger from yesterday is there. Her name is Spiral, and they talk for a while before continuing along the road to Skyward. They run into some lost slavers, but are soon freed after an attack by a mysterious robot. Chapter 4 - Keypad: They come across a factory, where they decide to make camp for the night. After fighting some radscorpions, Spiral goes to sleep in the security room while Firewall explores. He finds some old terminal logs and an unusual energy weapon. Chapter 5 - Rain: At dawn they continue into the city. They talk for a while at a bus shelter, dodge a minefield and have a run-in with the robot from their encounter with the slavers, right before a group of Steel Rangers destroy the robot and take them captive. Apparently Spiral used to be one of them. Chapter 6 - Scribe: Firewall and Spiral are taken to the Steel Ranger's makeshift base in an old appliance store. Spiral reveals that she had left the Steel Rangers after an incident on her first mission outside the base, but gives no details. Now she is to be executed for deserting. Firewall convinces Oatey Porridge, the Rangers' leader, to let them go free if he can get the Rangers into Lab 1, his old place of work. With Spiral outside as a hostage, Firewall enters the facility only to discover that whoever was controlling the Spritebot lives inside. With only one hour until the Rangers detonate their bomb collars, he must deactivate the security system. Chapter 7 - Down: Firewall convinces the Spritebot to help him go free. The Spritebot agrees to let the Rangers in and wipe them out in return for two tasks: Firewall must plug a cable into a terminal on the lowest floor of the facility, and retrieve a file from the Museum of Science and Witchcraft. As Firewall explores the facility, the Spritebot reveals that he was once one of Firewall's bosses at Pendulum Labs. He goes to the lowest floor but is attacked by a huge robot, so he goes back to another floor. The Spritebot recognises the energy weapon from the factory as a prototype EMP gun stolen during the war, and Firewall uses it to defeat the robot. He plugs the cable into the terminal and goes outside to talk to the Rangers. Chapter 8 - Museum: Firewall tells the Rangers that the security system has been deactivated, and they remove the bomb collars. Once the Rangers have gone into the facility, Firewall and Spiral leave for the Museum. It quickly becomes dark but they eventually find their way, meeting two guards at the gate. Once they enter the Museum they go looking for the file, and find a maneframe. Before they can steal the hard drives, though, an alarm goes off and the guards come running. Gauze, the leader of the ponies at the Museum, tells them that they can have the file if they investigate some ponies who went missing. Chapter 9 - Tomorrow: Before they leave the next morning, Spiral wanders around the Museum and runs into a blind mare. The mare warns her to leave Skyward while she still can. She meets up with Firewall again and they begin searching the city for the missing ponies. Eventually they find signs of raiders in an old shopping centre, and they enter through the roof hoping to catch them by surprise. The raiders are inside playing cards and are caught off-guard, at which point they explain that they were hired by Gauze to kill some ponies. Before Spiral can act on this information, Porridge shows up again, apparently surviving Lab 1 and tracking Firewall to the shopping centre. Spiral uses the EMP gun to disable his armour and kills him. She realises that going back to the Museum or Lab 1 is no longer an option and decides to heed the blind mare's advice. They leave. Chapter 0 - Enter: At some point in the past, the blind mare wakes up in an unfamiliar Lab 2. Setting Skyward is set in a small city of the same name. Before the war, it was home to Pendulum Laboratories, a company producing experimental technology, as well as a slew of other companies that found the city's isolation convenient. In the years since the apocalypse the city has been left largely abandoned. Exceptions to this rule include a nearby contingent of Steel Rangers, a small settlement in a museum, and a small raider population. Characters Main Characters * Firewall A beige unicorn with a blue mane. His cutie mark is a printed circuit board, based on his talent in electronics and computers. An employee from Pendulum Labs who was put into suspended animation as part of a large team of ponies. Something went wrong and Firewall woke up two hundred years in the future, apparently the only survivor from the project. He is something of a pessimist, with very little in the way of combat skills. * Spiral A grey unicorn with a black mane. Her cutie mark is a spiral, like her name, which she finds unfairly meaningless. She was once a Scribe for the Steel Rangers. Other characters Firewall runs into four raiders in Chapter 2, six slavers and some slaves in Chapter 3, a group of Steel Rangers in Chapter 5, a settlement of ponies in Chapter 8 and six more raiders in Chapter 9. Notable individuals include Oatey Porridge (a Steel Ranger Paladin) and Gauze (the leader of the ponies at the Museum). Two characters appear in the prologue, a blue unicorn and an orange pegasus, one of whom is implied to somehow survive in Lab 1 until the present day. Firewall also finds a log written by Chocolate Chip (the owner of the factory in Chapter 4). Trivia * Each chapter included its own piece of vector artwork, usually depicting an abstract version of something from the text itself. * A map was produced as a cover for the story. Many locations on the map do not appear in the final version. * While the story was undergoing rewrites, it received another cover depicting a stylised version of Lab 2. External Links * Fallout Equestria: Skyward on FimFiction * Fallout Equestria: Skyward on the Fallout: Equestria Resource Category:Stories Category:Fallout: Equestria Side Story Category:In Progress Side stories